It was there. It was all there, right in front of him. Every answer to every question he'd ever wanted to ask, he held in his hand.
It wasn't a matter of how to extract the information from the old-fashioned flash drive. It was a matter of whether or not he should.
The thing of it was, he had been young enough when she died, that he really had no clear memory of her, and he often suspected that what fleeting ones he did have were shadows fueled by the stories his two older brothers had told him over the years. What she smelled like. How her laugh sounded. How she tried to sound stern, but it came out far too loving for any of them to cower in fear at the tone.
Sure, he knew what she looked like; they had photo albums, after all, most of which had long since been converted to 3D holographic images courtesy of Brains and his endless supply of inventions. But knowing what someone looked like in 2D or even 3D didn't equate to having actual memories of touching them, looking at them, being held by them.
As he had once heard Alan tell Gordon, you really couldn't miss someone you'd never known.
Yet that was the point John struggled with the most in all this. Unlike one-year old Gordon or newborn Alan, John had known Lucille Tracy. For three-and-a-half years he'd known her, been fed by her, potty-trained by her, comforted by her. Had his scraped knees bandaged and his tears wiped away by her. Had his diaper changed, his clothing washed and his bottle fed to him by her.
It was she who'd taken him from bottle to sippy cup to actual plastic cup so that he could be like his big brothers when he drank his milk. It was she who'd helped him pick out his first package of real big-boy underwear and encouraged him to model it to his brothers and father with pride, who'd explained to him what it meant to be a big brother two different times. To whom he'd sworn on the head of his favorite rocket ship toy that he would be the best big brother there ever was, even better than Scott or Virgil were to him.
But see, he didn't remember any of those things. Not one. Everything he knew about her, came from his grandmother's stories, Scott's memories, Virgil's sometimes hilarious recounting of their antics as children. Children who were carefree and happy in the days before they learned that having a mother wasn't any guarantee that you'd actually be able to keep her.
So many times over the years, John had tried many different methods for bringing memories back that he felt to his core he should have, buried somewhere deep inside his brain. He'd tried simply lying in the dark with the hum and thrum of Thunderbird 5 relaxing him, and thinking as far back into his childhood as he could. It never worked. He'd always get to about five years of age, and then draw nothing but blanks.
He'd tried self-hypnosis, with the help of digitally recorded sessions put out by some of the highest-praised hypnotists out there. He'd even gone to an expert in memory recollection, a rather new field of science at the time, to volunteer for the man's research. By the end of six weeks, they'd uncovered nothing.
Eventually he'd talked to a psychologist friend that he'd met many years ago at a seminar. He'd explained everything to her and asked for her professional opinion. She had closed her hand over his, looked him in the eye and said, "It's not unusual for us not to remember the toddler years. But if you're actually repressing any memories you do have, John, it's because your mind's doing it on purpose."
"But why? I want to remember," he'd protested.
"When we repress memories, it's because our subconscious is trying to protect us. You could potentially go through years of therapy, hypnosis, or any of several other methods for trying to retrieve memories you've locked away. But the possibility exists that it won't actually unlock the memories for you."
That had been five years ago. Now, just two days shy of his fortieth birthday, John had arrived back at the penthouse suite owned by Tracy Corporation in the heart of Manhattan, after a day spent with the Board of Directors going over two of the Corp's highest-profile projects, to find a very small envelope had been slipped under the penthouse door.
The envelope had contained nothing but this flash drive and a very short note which read: If you want to know why you can't remember your mother, listen to this. ~ Someone Who Cares
John had no idea who could've left the flash drive for him, or who could've even known he wanted to remember the mother who'd died thirty-six years earlier. The Tracy home movies had been watched so many times Brains had eventually had to repair their digital signatures. They had everything there was to have; nothing was hidden from any of them, even though their father had never wanted to openly discuss Lucille. Even so, they rarely spoke of it to anyone outside the family.
He wondered briefly if that psychologist friend of his had somehow gotten hold of whatever this was, but he hadn't spoken to her in years, and thought even if she had been the one to get it, things might be a bit awkward now, confronting her so long after their one conversation about it.
John had used some of the scanning equipment located in a hidden room behind one of the penthouse walls and determined that the small rectangular-shaped object in his hand was nothing but a simple, ordinary – if old-school – flash drive. Their personal computers these days resembled flat touch-screen monitors that were no more than two hand-widths long, and were a marvel of modern technology. The old USB-style ports didn't even exist anymore, not on desktop models or any other type of device.
But of course, International Rescue could crack anything open, given the right equipment, and John had what he needed on-hand in the suite to tap into the flash drive and extract its information.
It held a single file, something that appeared to be an audio recording in an extremely outdated mp3 format. John frowned. Now he had to find a codec that would be able to access and read the file, and translate it into something John's computer could play.
The file was called IDOSZ20050308. John blanched as he located and started downloading a codec to translate the mp3 file.
March 8th, 2005 was the date of his mother's accident.
The codec finished downloading, and installed itself. John ran the mp3 file through it, and after seventeen minutes, found that he had a new file that his computer could play.
He loosened his tie, unbuttoned the first two buttons of his dress shirt, and sank onto the couch in the penthouse suite's living room area. Hesitating with his finger over the play button on the screen, he took a deep breath, and then tapped it.
Two weeks later found John having returned to Tracy Island, the majority of his in-person business at Tracy Corp concluded.
Five days earlier, he'd sent the recording to his eldest brother.
There were the customary greetings in the hangar after he'd taxied the plane to a stop and run her through the standard post-flight checks. But one person was noticeably absent, lame excuses made by Virgil, and so John knew. He knew Scott had listened to it, and that it had upset him. Why, John couldn't be sure, but he planned on finding out.
And so, once he'd disentangled himself from the customary debrief on Corp business that his father always demanded after such trips, John found his missing brother in one of the store rooms in the labyrinth of tunnels far beneath the villa.
"Did you listen to it?" was how John greeted him through the storage room's open door.
Scott's body stiffened.
"You remembered it already before you listened, didn't you." It wasn't a question.
There was a moment of silence which spoke more words than the quiet "Yes" John finally received.
"Why didn't you ever tell me?"
Scott turned and looked him in the eye. "What would that have gained, Johnny?"
"It was the whole reason I couldn't remember Mom!" John countered, knowing his voice had risen dangerously, but not really giving a crap. "I was afraid to access any memories of her at all because of the one you never should have kept from me!"
"You mean, you remember her now?"
"More than I ever thought possible!" John replied, his voice still too high and too loud. "I remember her scent, I remember her playing with me. I remember her putting Gordon in my arms, for Christ's sake! I remember her reading to me, singing to me. Thirty-six years I've been trying to remember her, and I couldn't because you didn't tell me the truth!"
"My greatest fear was you blaming yourself for the accident, John," Scott said, his voice steady but his face gone pale. He grabbed John's forearm and held it tight, whether to ground himself or his brother, John wasn't sure.
"Yeah? Well, my greatest fear was never being able to have a single memory of her that I could call my own, Scott. You nearly took that away from me. If it hadn't been for someone slipping me that recording that OnStar* made, I never would have had that before I died."
Scott looked down at the floor, swallowed hard, then looked back up at John, bringing his other hand to John's other arm. "I'm sorry. I thought I was doing what was right. I thought I was protecting you."
"Look," John said, shrugging out of his brother's grasp, "I know you thought you were protecting me, but I was only three-and-a-half."
"Exactly. You think I wanted you to go through life blaming yourself for distracting her just long enough for the accident to happen?"
John was silent for a moment. Then, quietly, "I heard the click."
"Yes." Scott nodded. "When you got out of your seatbelt. Right before that I'd unbuckled and turned around because Virgil said you were trying to get out of your seat."
John just looked at him.
"I hit the OnStar emergency button with my elbow."
"That woman's voice was the OnStar operator asking us if everything was okay."
Scott nodded.
"And then…Mom…telling the operator to hold on a minute. Telling me to sit back down because it was too dangerous for me not to be buckled in."
Scott nodded again, a small and sad smile playing at his lips. "But you just had to see the space shuttle launching into the sky. You couldn't see it from your back seat window."
"So I tried crawling over the front seat."
"Yeah. And Mom tried to push you back into the back seat."
"Scott," John said, voice cracking as he sat down on a metal crate. "Tell me. I know what's on the recording. But I want to hear it from you."
Long seconds of silence stretched out between them. When Scott finally spoke, his voice was barely a whisper.
"I leaned over the seat to push you back. Virgil grabbed your legs and pulled, but you were still trying to see the space shuttle out the front windshield."
John leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and put his hands in his head.
"Virgil pulled, I pushed, and you grabbed the sleeve of Mom's sweater."
When Scott didn't continue, John looked up to find a tear rolling down his stoic Air Force brother's face. "I should've had better control of you, of Virgil."
"It's not your fault," John said quickly, hopping to his feet.
"Yeah, well, it's not yours, either," Scott said, swiping at his cheek as if angry that a tear had dared show itself anywhere in Scott Tracy's presence. "And I needed to make sure you never thought it was."
John swallowed hard against the lump that had formed in his throat.
"Are you sorry you know now?" Scott asked quietly.
Not trusting his voice, John simply shook his head and looked away.
"Then I'm not sorry I finally gave you the flash drive."
John's jaw dropped, but Scott was gone before he could even think of what to say to that.
He didn't really blame himself, though he knew he easily could. Lucy could've done any number of things the second John broke free of his booster seat. She could've slowed down. She could've immediately pulled over to the shoulder of the road. She could've yelled, although he didn't think Lucille Tracy had ever yelled at anyone but her husband.
Who knew what else she could've done? Maybe there'd been something blocking her from pulling over, a truck or a long line of cars in the slow lane. Maybe there'd been too much traffic, or maybe Lucille simply hadn't thought anything would go as wrong as it had.
Logically, at three-and-a-half years of age, John knew he wouldn't have had any sense of the true danger of doing what he'd done trying to see that shuttle launch. And at only seven years of age, Virgil wouldn't have seen beyond anything but trying to keep John's feet from kicking him in the face as he struggled to crawl over the front seat.
And Scott, well…nine years old is a tough time, when you're really starting to understand there's a world beyond the tiny one you're growing up in, and still being enough of a child that you don't always foresee consequences.
None of them would've ever considered death. It's such a foreign concept to kids at the ages they were then.
John knew he'd probably never get another word about the whole thing out of Scott as long as they lived. And he could only secretly hope that Scott didn't really and truly blame himself for any of it, because shit, the guy had seriously paid his dues by being left to partially raise his four younger brothers at barely nine years of age.
And John? Well, John was relieved that his greatest fear of never being able to remember his mother wouldn't be realized. It seemed silly to him now, with the type of work he and his brothers did, that something like not being able to retrieve memories would scare him more than going into burning buildings to rescue victims.
But that's how John was put together. He was introspective, and wouldn't think twice about skydiving out of Thunderbird 2 to rescue a man who'd fallen from a damaged aircraft at thirty thousand feet. But he'd dreaded maybe meeting his mother in the Afterlife and not having a clue who she was except from old photos and videos.
John knew one thing: when all was said and done, he now had a handful of memories to hold onto. Not all of them were good, especially the recollection of the accident and the role he'd played in it. But in the end, wasn't that the point of human existence? Wasn't it all about people being the sum total of their experiences and their memories, living on forever and ever as long as other people remembered them?
Well, even though it was painful, John wanted to remember.
And now, thanks to the brother who'd always looked out for him whether John wanted it or not, he did.
*For those unfamiliar with it, OnStar is a navigation and emergency system for automobiles, manufactured by General Motors (GM), which can include getting directions, emergency services when you're in need of help while in the car, or if you're in an accident. The emergency calls through the system are recorded just like 911. The control panel is sometimes mounted on the front dash or actually embedded in it. You can learn more at onstar DOT com if you're curious.
